Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Where no yarn has gone before...

At the first of the year, I participated in a swap on the Spindler's list. As part of the swap, I got some raw Cotswold fleece from two different sheep. I have never carded anything in my life. I know I prefer combed tops to carded roving so I don't own any hand cards. Since I wasn't sure that I would enjoy it, I just picked up two big slicker brushes for dogs. Yesterday, I sat down and started messing around with the fleece. I started carding or something similar to it - I don't have any books that cover carding so I was basically just making it up as I went along. As I was working, Bear, our Golden Retriever was watching and obviously interested. His brush was sitting next to me, so I figured, why not? I brushed out some of his "fleece" and put it on my "cards" with the Cotswold and mixed it together. I made 3 rolags (has anyone else noticed that rolags look like giant, fluffy hairballs? ) and couldn't stand it anymore, I had to spin it. So, I started spinning it into a medium weight single, and after I plied it, I had about 10 yards. You can see the little skein I made above. The reddish, apricot colored parts are from Bear and the grays and browns are courtesy of T'Pring, the Cotswold ewe. I have no idea what I'll do with the yarn, but I definitely had fun making it. I think Cotswold is usually combed because of its long staple length (it was easily 7-8 inches long) and there were some parts where the fibers seemed to double back on each other, probably because of this and the fact that the dog brushes just aren't as big as really hand cards anyway.

The other bit of fleece I got is white from a sheep named McCoy (I don't know if he's a ram or wether, so we'll just call him a sheep). If you're wondering, yes T'Pring and McCoy were named after T'Pring and McCoy. The same farm that they live on also has James T. Kirk, Jean Luc Picard and the rest of the gang. For some reason this makes sense to me. After all, you have to admit that Angora bunnies definitely look like this.